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Men's Political representation
Abstract
In much research on gender and representation, the constraining factors for women’s political representation have served as a backdrop against which women’s activities are contextualized, rather than as a primary focus of research. Research explicitly focusing on men’s over-representation in politics does the opposite: it puts the reproduction of male dominance at the center of the analysis. Such a focus on men and masculinities and their relation to political power requires a set of analytical tools that are partly distinctly different from the tools used to analyses women’s under-representation. The article uses a feminist institutionalist framework to identify the logic of recruitment underpinning the reproduction of male dominance. It proposes and elaborates on two main types of political capital that under certain circumstances may reinforce male dominance and resist challenges to it: homosocial capital, consisting of instrumental and expressive rules favoring different types of similarity; and male capital, consisting of sexist and patriarchal that are always favoring men. Although these different types may be empirically related, they should be analytically separated because they require different methodological approaches and call for different strategies for change.
... Despite the increasing inclusion of women and ethnic minorities, institutions continue to be gendered and racialized as they reinforce and maintain political hierarchies between and among gender and ethnic groups (Hawkesworth, 2003). Masculinity remains the political norm defining appropriate competences and behaviour (Bjarnegård, 2018). According to Bjarnegård (2018), the reproduction of masculine norms and practices within political institutions encompasses the reinforcement of male power and the resistance to newcomers in politics. ...
... Masculinity remains the political norm defining appropriate competences and behaviour (Bjarnegård, 2018). According to Bjarnegård (2018), the reproduction of masculine norms and practices within political institutions encompasses the reinforcement of male power and the resistance to newcomers in politics. These inherent 8 patterns of inclusion and exclusion rely on the gendered and racialized access to essential political resources that explicitly or implicitly benefit those who are considered as "similar" or who are already in place (i.e. ...
... resources that turn into homosocial capital), or simply benefit ethnic majority men as such (i.e. resources that turn into male capital) (Bjarnegård, 2018). This differenciated access to valuable resources among gender and ethnic groups might make it more difficult for women and ethnic minorities to access (positions of) power, e.g. to get selected on higher or eligible list positions and to get voters' support. ...
Despite the increasing presence of women and ethnic minorities, elected assemblies remain largely dominated by ethnic majority men. Previous researchers have often focused on mechanisms and processes enhancing or hindering the representation of women and ethnic minority groups in isolation of each other. Research has for instance shown that the electoral system is a determinant factor for women representation, while the sociodemographic context appears to be more determinant to explain levels of ethnic minority representation. But more recent researches indicate that these mechanisms and processes often ignore the presence of individuals situated at the intersection of these groups, i.e. ethnic minority women. The present research considers intersectionality as a research paradigm to understand the complexity of the (dis)advantage experienced by individuals in the electoral process based on their intersectional identities.
This research aims to highlight the contextual impact of proportional representation (PR) rules on the intersectional representation of gender and ethnic groups. This study builds on the previous assumption that, more than electoral rules, it is parties and voters’ intertwined roles and behaviour in the (s)election process that ultimately determine who gets represented within elected assemblies. The objective of this research is to demonstrate how the behaviour of parties and voters towards marginalized groups members is influenced by the combination of sociodemographic and institutional factors, and how it shapes the barriers and opportunities faced by these groups to enter politics. This research highlights the necessity to consider relationships between actors as well as between actors and their environment and shows how these dynamic interactions determine when and how intersectional identities lead to a (dis)advantage in the electoral process.
Brussels local elections are considered as a relevant case to conduct this study because of the saliency of ethnicity and gender in this context and because the strong preferential voting system in use allows for both parties and voters to play strategic roles in the representation of gender and ethnic groups.
... Past research shows that the informal rules, norms and rituals that govern the day-to-day running of political parties favour male politicians (Mackay et al., 2010;Bjarnegård and Kenny, 2016;Lowndes, 2019). These gendered informal rules-in-use have their roots in the long history of male over-representation in politics, which has given rise to a stereotypically masculine model of an 'ideal politician' (Bjarnegård, 2018). Therefore, stereotypically masculine traits and values are seen by parties as highly meriting for a successful political career and are also believed to be in demand by voters (Murray, 2010;Kenny, 2013;Kenny and Verge, 2016). ...
... Political parties that are part of government are thus likely to carefully consider who is to be given access to these potentially potent sources of political capital. It is in these conditions that the gendered ideas about who is an ideal representative of the party might provide male legislators with an arbitrary advantage (Bjarnegård, 2018). ...
This article compares access to bill making and senior legislative offices among male and female MPs when their respective parties are in government or in opposition. Using an original dataset with all Czech MPs elected between 1996 and 2017, the article finds that female legislators face a more restricted access to these important legislative assignments when their party is part of government and when their value as a means of generating political capital is high. This points to the specific conditions under which female MPs might be arbitrarily held back by their parties in the parliamentary workplace.
... Although this argument has not yet been systematically evaluated, it is consistent with evidence from several case studies of coalition formation on both the national (e.g., Luebbert 1986;Strøm and Müller 1999) and the sub-national level (Leander 2024;Wänström 2018)-and it resonates with long-standing $ndings within organizational sociology and psychology that the manifestation of personal ties may signi$cantly reduce transaction costs of interactions to the bene$t of the involved actors (Granove%er 1973;Stam et al. 2014;Uzzi 1997). In political science, scholars have drawn on social ties theory to explain, for instance, the reproduction of men's dominance in politics (Bjarnegård 2018), and the higher legislative e#ectiveness among socially connected legislators in the United States (e.g., Ba%aglini et al. 2020;Kirkland 2011). However, to the best of our knowledge, such theories have only recently been applied to inter-party parliamentary cooperation such as coalition bargaining, and so far only with reference to politicians who supposedly know each other through membership in a local football club(Škvrňák 2021). ...
This study seeks to advance our understanding of how inter-party personal ties among politicians impact legislative cooperation between parties. Considering that parliamentary bargaining is typically featured by weak or lacking formal institutions and high uncertainty—the kind of context in which organizational sociology research has found personal ties to be particularly influential for human interactions—we argue that personal ties between parties should increase the likelihood of cooperation. We evaluate our argument analyzing Swedish local governments, combining registry data on horizontal dynastic ties—i.e., two politicians in different parties being first- or second-degree relatives or partners—with survey data on self-reported inter-party personal connections. Our analyses consistently substantiate that inter-party ties—and especially so close family ties—impact government formation and other types of legislative cooperation. These findings have implications for our understanding of parliamentary dynamics as well as the representation of less-connected groups.
... Studying the 'doing' of democracy entails a focus on specific ways of making representative claims (Saward, 2006) on behalf of 'the will of the people' (or on behalf of other collective subjectivities, such as the public, the nation, humanity, workers, women, the 99%). Such claims become performative, if constituencies adopt them as a valid descriptions of their collective self: they then bring this collective subjectivity into existence (Bourdieu, 1985;Disch, 2008Disch, , 2010Disch, , 2019Latour, 2003;Seitz, 1995). ...
We study efforts at promoting deliberative mini-publics as a model of democracy. Our focus is on practices supporting the circulation of know-how for doing mini-publics. In this paper we center on the building of infrastructures for knowledge exchange in and around a network known as Democracy R&D. This is a network of mini-publics practitioners from around the world with the declared goal of adding momentum to democratic innovation by enhancing translocal connections, community building, and knowledge. We look at how the network is organized, how online communication platforms are installed, and how observatory devices draw dispersed practices together into a shared frame of mutual learning and collective action. How do such practices configure the ways in which knowledge can flow across sites? How do they constitute an instrument space, a translocal assemblage of knowing and doing democracy by means of deliberative mini-publics? Using concepts like scopic media and centers of calculation, we discuss these practices for how they enable and constrain the circulation of know-how, configure processes of mutual learning, shape the translocal innovation process, and thus, at a distance, also prefigure local ways of knowing and doing politics.
... political parties-are gendered organizations with a tradition of excluding people other than elite men (Bjarnegård and Kenny 2015). For example, Bjarnegård (2013Bjarnegård ( , 2018 suggests that recruitment is gendered, not the least because male candidates have access to homosocial networks, which are key to rise in these organizations. "What matters, if you want to get a seat, is who you know" (Bjarnegård and Kenny 2015, 750). ...
This article focuses on a specific group of legislators facing large hurdles during recruitment processes, namely young women. Building on the institutional literature, we hypothesize that gender quota regulations, youth quotas, and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems should particularly benefit young women. Our quantitative study, capturing one hundred elections conducted between 2012 and 2017, finds partial support for our expectations. For the three hypotheses, we find that legislative quotas and voluntary party quotas for both youths and gender do not significantly increase the share of young women. In contrast, PR electoral systems render the electoral arena less discriminatory toward younger women.
This paper assesses differences between women and men political candidates in their likelihood to interact with peers who share the same gender, political affiliation, electoral district, incumbency, age, and the governmental status of their party. Using Twitter (currently X) data from Finland’s 2019 election campaign, we find a tendency towards homophily—a tendency to interact predominantly with similar others—among all candidates across the various studied characteristics. However, some gender differences in the tendency towards homophily emerge. Notably, women are more inclined than men to retweet candidates from their own party but are less likely to retweet peers with the same incumbency status and the same gender. Our multivariate analyses further show that retweet tendencies based on age, shared electoral district and party governmental status exhibit no significant gender disparities. These nuanced variations in homophilous relations highlight the complex interplay between gender and other characteristics in candidates’ social media interactions during electoral campaigns.
In der Herausbildung und Stabilisierung von Demokratieformen verschränken sich epistemische und politische Praktiken: Die Wissenschaft von der Demokratie ist konstitutiv für die Demokratie. Das arbeite ich hier am Beispiel deliberativer Bürgerräte heraus. Hier handelt es sich um ein spezielles Verfahren der Öffentlichkeitsbeteiligung, von dem seine Protagonist:innen behaupten, es sei in der Lage, den kollektiven Willen des Volkes zum Ausdruck zu bringen, frei von verzerrenden Einflüssen wie Informationsmangel und Machtasymmetrien. In der historischen Perspektive wird deutlich, wie diese spezielle Praxis politischer Repräsentation mitgestaltet wird durch wissenschaftliche Praktiken, die sie beobachten, funktional theoretisieren, empirisch vermessen, experimentell testen und technologisch optimieren. Diese Verschränkung von epistemischen und politischen Praktiken ist typisch für die Fabrikation von Demokratie in spätmodernen Wissensgesellschaften. Forschungsansätze der Science and Technology Studies (STS) gewinnen deshalb Bedeutung für die empirische Demokratieforschung. Mit ihnen kann die epistemische Konstruktionsarbeit in den Blick genommen werden, die verschiedenen Demokratieformen zugrunde liegt. So treten die spezifische Selektivität und die Performativität von Demokratietheorien hervor und es bieten sich Ansätze, Demokratieinnovationen reflexiv zu gestalten.
How does manipulation of primary elections affect the selection of women candidates for parliament? The underrepresentation of women in politics is a well-researched global phenomenon. However, as most work focuses on general elections, we overlook the disadvantages that women face in the selection process. Specifically, primary elections often provide ample room for manipulation. We argue that manipulation skews electoral contests in favor of candidates with material and inter-personal resources, who are more likely to be men. We collect unique data via on-the-ground observation of 119 primary election rounds (featuring 316 aspirants) in Malawi's 2019 parliamentary election and interview candidates to shed light on hitherto uninvestigated internal party primaries. We show that while women running in free and fair primaries were more likely to win nomination than men, their chances were substantially reduced where primaries were flawed. The quantitative findings are corroborated with qualitative accounts of the gendered effect of primary-day manipulation in party primaries. The results have implications for debates on descriptive representation, electoral integrity, and political parties. 2
Understanding the role of institutions can help explain why gender equality policies often fail and why the efforts of gender equality advocates are frequently frustrated. Focusing on micro-foundations and using cases from comparative politics, the article builds a model that specifies the mechanisms whereby political institutions are systematically gendered. Political opportunities and outcomes are shaped not only by rules ‘about gender’ but also by seemingly neutral rules that have ‘gendered effects’, due to their interaction with institutions outside the realm of formal politics. Rules shape behaviour in gendered ways through mechanisms of regulation, obligation and persuasion. Actors reproduce gendered institutions through enacting rules, but they also generate change through adapting, resisting or reforming them. The article specifies concepts and methods for researching how political institutions are gendered within and across political systems. It also identifies points of intervention for those seeking to build more gender-just political institutions.
Violence against women in politics is increasingly recognized around the world but especially in Latin America as an emerging tactic to deter women's political participation. We survey how this concept has been defined by academics and practitioners across the region largely in terms of physical and psychological violence and draw on global data and research in various disciplines to propose expanding this concept to include two further forms of violence: economic and symbolic. We provide examples of all four types of violence in Latin American countries and then consider a range of solutions that might be pursued in light of this broader definition. We emphasize that a comprehensive approach provides the best means for tackling violence in all its forms.
This article scrutinizes the role of political parties in gender quota implementation. First, it theoretically specifies and operationalizes the concept of bureaucratization in relation to candidate selection. Second, it examines whether parties with bureaucratized selection procedures are better at implementing legally mandated candidate quotas than other parties. We measure implementation as the number of women candidates and women elected (the latter measuring implementation of the spirit of quota laws). Using unique data on almost 100 Latin American parties, the analysis shows that once quotas are in place, parties with bureaucratized selection procedures put substantially more women on their candidate lists than other parties. However, these parties are only better at implementing the letter of the law: they do not get more women elected.
In this compelling book Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski provide the first full account of legislative recruitment in Britain for twenty-five years. Their central concern is how and why some politicians succeed in moving into the highest offices of state, while others fail. The book examines the relative dearth of women, black and working-class Members of Parliament, and whether the evident social bias in the British political élite matters for political representation. Legislative recruitment concerns the critical step from lower levels (activists, local counsellors) to a parliamentary career. The authors draw evidence from the first systematic surveys of parliamentary candidates, Members of Parliament and party selectors, as well as detailed personal interviews. The study explores how and why people become politicians, and the consequences for parties, legislatures and representative government.
In Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments, Miki Caul Kittilson examines women's presence in party politics and national legislatures, and the conditions under which their entrance occurs. She theorizes that parties are more likely to incorporate women when their strategy takes into account the institutional and political "opportunity structures" of both the party and party system. Kittilson studies how women pressed for greater representation, and how democratic party systems responded to their demands. Research on women's representation has largely focused at the national level. Yet these studies miss the substantial variations between parties within and across European democracies. This book provides systematic cross-national and case study evidence to show that political parties are the key mechanism for increasing women's parliamentary representation. Kittilson uncovers party-level mechanisms that explain the growth in women's parliamentary participation since the 1970s in ten European democracies. The inclusion of new challengers in party politics is often attributed to mounting pressures from activists and public opinion at large. This book contradicts the conventional wisdom by demonstrating that women's gains within parties flow not only from pressure from party supporters, but also from calculated efforts made by the central party leadership in a top-down fashion under specific circumstances. Certainly women's efforts are essential, and they can be most effective when they are framed, timed, and targeted toward the most opportune structures within the party hierarchy. Kittilson concludes that specific party institutions encourage women's ascendance to the top ranks of power within a political party.
Why hasn’t the marked increase in women in politics over the last half century led to the expected results of increased gender equality and more democracy? In order to propose a new answer to this question, which is central for both theoretical and empirical feminist political science, I look at the case of Putin’s Russia as one of the authoritarian-leaning regimes that have promoted women into politics while simultaneously becoming more misogynist. Building on feminist institutionalism and the study of Russia’s regime dynamics, both of which are extending the study of informal institutions, I claim that women are being fast-tracked into politics informally, not just formally such as by party or legislative quotas. Yet these women are then boxed in by informal rules and by parallel institutions and posts, with virtually no opportunities to advocate for women’s interests. Putin’s regime has promoted women to be “stand ins” during times of crisis or change, “loyalists” and “showgirls” when the regime needs to showcase elections and representation, and “cleaners” when the appearance of corruption threatens the regime. Even demonstrations of ultimate loyalty have not protected those women who once advocated for feminist policies. This exercise in concept building suggests a framework for thinking about the importance and operation of informal institutions, sustained by gendered and homophobic rules, as a bulwark of male dominance that undermines women’s representation. There are also important policy implications, as advocates have been pushing for more women in politics to address a variety of ills that, my analysis suggests, will not be solved by numbers alone.
Party office is a crucial political resource for those seeking a political career. It provides advantageous access to the distribution of the patronage parties are entitled to in party government democracies. This article aims at measuring this comparative advantage while simultaneously investigating whether it benefits women and men equally in political recruitment processes. We concentrate on viable candidacy for parliamentary office, ministerial appointments, as well as post-ministerial offices in public and semi-public life that are also in the hands of political parties to distribute. Our cross-national analysis of advanced industrial democracies shows that men are much more likely than women to benefit from holding party office in their ascendant political careers, even when controlling for other political resources, sociodemographic factors and country-level variables. This suggests that party office is a gendered political resource and that gender power dynamics are deeply entrenched in political parties.